wireless surround system YAMAHA MUSICCAST SURROUND
Yamaha’s MusicCast Surround offers surround when you want it, but a neat living room when you don’t.
Yamaha’s MusicCast Surround offers surround when you want it, but a neat living space and multiroom audio when you don’t.
Yamaha’s MusicCast platform has proven one of the most successful at connecting together multiple devices in different rooms for multiroom music playback. And Yamaha has given it a wide ecosystem, putting MusicCast not only in to the usual selection of wireless speakers and soundbars, but also into its amplifiers and receivers, into an ever-widening selection of lifestyle products, even across divisions into a piano, augmenting the technical tour de force which is the Yamaha Disklavier Enspire.
MusicCast has long been a bonus feature in the company’s soundbars and AV receivers, but in its original version this was focused on bringing music to these systems and linking them with other rooms. The introduction of ‘MusicCast Surround’ last year aims to change that, extending the system to movies and surround sound, connecting together devices in the same room, as well as other devices situated around the home.
In this way you can use MusicCast to create a surround system in a fairly ad hoc way. Having
all the surround speakers permanently wired up has become one of the barriers against having surround in a modern living room. But with MusicCast Surround you can bring in wireless speakers that you have in other rooms and temporarily (or permanently, if you like) re-purpose them as wireless rear speakers. Some of Yamaha’s MusicCast wireless speakers assist further in the décor stakes by being compact and modern in design, even coming in living-room-friendly white.
Other multiroom systems, including Sonos and HEOS, have previously allowed the use of their wireless speakers to supplement the relevant front soundbar product. But Yamaha’s implementation of MusicCast Surround can also work with proper AV receivers, and these allow far more input flexibility, including full HDMI switching, a higher calibre of surround processing, and a wider choice of front speaker solutions.
We noted in our review last issue of the standalone MusicCast 50 wireless speaker that it could be used either temporarily or permanently as the rear speakers in a MusicCast Surround arrangement — one unit placed centrally so that its stereo speakers can act as
both rears. So we thought we’d try that out, with Yamaha supplying the $1199 RX-V685 MusicCast-equipped AV receiver to act as the hub. All of Yamaha’s current RX-V ‘85’ series receivers have MusicCast onboard and can do MusicCast Surround, as can the current ‘80’ Aventage range, along with the CX-A5200 Aventage preamplifier and the RX-S602 slimline receiver. Even more neatly, you can pull the same trick with Yamaha’s MusicCast BAR 400 and MusicCast BAR 40.
Also supplied were two MusicCast 20 wireless speakers; these can also be paired and used as wireless rears as shown in our main image. So we had several options with which to investigate MusicCast Surround.
Bringing it together
Set-up of the receiver was wonderfully fast once we’d prised the plastic stoppers out of some of the speaker terminals so that we could plug in our normal front reference speakers in preparation for the MusicCast surround experiment. We gave the receiver Ethernet for networking, and our MusicCast app immediately picked up the unit on the network, requesting we allocate it to a room, and then initiating a firmware update.
The MusicCast 20 wireless speakers took a little longer to make their wireless connections, one requiring two attempts, the other four, but as we’ve found with MusicCast set-ups, just have a cup of tea and try again — we’ve never had one fail its wireless set-up entirely.
MusicCast sets up each device as a ‘room’ — that’s how MusicCast devices get named. But of course here we were planning to use everything in the same room. It doesn’t much matter in the end; give them a random room name and once you’ve allocated them to be surround speakers (see app screengrab), they disappear from the main menu anyway.
If you plan to use the MusicCast 20s individually in other rooms most of the time, name them for those rooms, then when your movie night is over, you simply press ‘Release speakers’ and they’ll return to their normal allocated rooms.
Certainly allocating them to their rear positions was simplicity itself. Under settings the MusicCast Surround/Stereo option is easy to find, high on the list. Select this, and you tell the app how many speakers you want to use for surround — so just one for the stereo MusicCast 50, but two when we used the two MusicCast 20s. Save it — the receiver made a little clunk noise — and you’re done.
You can also add a subwoofer — we used a conventional wired subwoofer fed from the AV receiver (as well as fronts and centre speakers), but you could add Yamaha’s $599 MusicCast SUB 100, which will also connect wirelessly to the Yamaha receiver. The SUB 100 has an eight-inch driver and benefits from Yamaha’s Advanced YST (Yamaha Active Servo Technology) and comes in a nice “modern piano” finish. And again, while you might be using it for MusicCast Surround on movie night, at other times the SUB 100 can pair with the MusicCast 50 or with the two MusicCast 20s in stereo to create a larger-sounding system.
Although this was enough to have everything working, we also went through the usual Yamaha receiver settings designed to optimise speaker distance and levels; we first
set the options manually, then used the supplied YPAO microphone to analyse the whooping test tones to see how close we’d got with our estimates, then we tweaked those settings again slightly to our taste. After a little use we pushed the surrounds up in level a few dB, as they were proving a little too subtle (though subtle is usually good in surround sound; we get distracted by hot rears).
We had the MusicCast 20s positioned behind us but not right in the corners, to protect their tonality, and we set them just above ear height in the hope of getting some feeling of height as well as surround, though there is as yet no way to allocate MusicCast speakers to actual height or presence channels.
Performance
We were immediately impressed that the combination managed to create a soundfield that delivered impressive continuity of movement despite the difference in size and style from our front speakers. When we played the ‘Leaf’ sequence from Dolby’s Atmos test disc (which is actually a sycamore seed, rather than a leaf, but let’s not go there), the leaf/seed passed in its brief loop behind the listening position, the MusicCast 20s working to deliver a complete circle, rather than the side-gapside that we so often hear from front-only soundbars, even those that attempt to ‘fake’ a surround effect.
After some more successful Dolby fare, we loaded up some music Blu-rays to enjoy the increased sense of crowd atmosphere that surround listening can bring. The 2017 Wembley gig from Jeff Lynne’s ELO sounded
so good that we lost nearly an hour to that demo… and the rears revealed clearly how the crowd on this recording is ‘pushed’ up between songs then pulled back again a few bars into each song — Jeff wouldn’t want a constant crowd level disturbing the clarity of his production, after all!
We also played some more challenging surround music, where the rears are used for instrumentation rather than effect. Though only a mere DVD, the ‘Void’ compilation of Flaming Lips videos is a true 5.1 feast, the mix merrily swinging major
elements around the entire set of speakers. On Fight Test the entire drum mix is swung continuously in a circle around the listener by some madman producer with a joystick, while vocals get thrown from channel to channel — indeed we have our suspicions that this entire collection was surround-mixed under significant quantities of something illicit... The Yamaha combo did a wonderful job of joining the party; the immersive mix burst from all corners, and there was no sensation of tonal disruption even as those drums swung around the room, the subwoofer preventing too much
evidence of mismatch between large front speakers and much smaller wireless MusicCast 20s behind. Equally importantly they delivered it musically, achieving peak emotivity on the magnificent final mix of Do You Realize.
Of course the Flaming Lips set is an artificial world of sound which can’t be judged fully against reality. So we loaded the entirely acoustic audio Blu-ray of Jienat’s Mira, world music recorded mainly in Hammerfest, Norway; this acoustic world was again faithfully rendered, especially as most of the required slam came from front-mixed elements.
We also tried AIX’s excellent 5.1 stage mixes via USB, but couldn’t persuade the receiver to read the multichannel wav files.
During all this we never once heard a drop-out; we gather that MusicCast receivers beam to the rears using built-in wireless, rather than stressing your home network with the additional streams, which may explain why the system seems robust in this way. Nor did we note any excessive latency delay in delivering the signal this way; lipsync was either being internally adjusted or just wasn’t an issue.
We also had several sessions replacing the MusicCast 20 pair with the MusicCast 50, the left and right drivers of this single unit firing either side of its rear position (see the diagram below). This also worked well enough, though it was inevitably more limited in the sense of rear spread, and it also really only works as a one-person surround system, in that the MusicCast 50 needs to sit directly behind your head to get the correct positioning of left and right rears. If you have a MusicCast 50, by all means employ it this way; it’ll deliver surround. But if you’re making a choice, two MusicCast 20s deliver a superior effect.
And we finished by removing the centre channel and subwoofer, leaving the receiver to deliver a phantom centre from the front pair, and share the bass. This simplified 4.0 surround may suit many homes, and loses very little.
Conclusion
It did occur to us that two of the receiver’s amplification channels lie fallow when using MusicCast Surround, but given the flexibility to reassign amp channels six and seven for biamping, presence or second-zone use, it seems worthwhile given the overall convenience gained. And this wouldn’t be true if using one of Yamaha’s MusicCast Surround front-only soundbars. (We also wonder if in the future this technology could appear in Yamaha’s stereo receivers, too, making them surround-capable in this wireless way.)
In each different configuration, Yamaha’s MusicCast Surround proved entirely successful in delivering an immersive surround field, and it certainly shows, yet again, that there’s no substitution in surround terms for rear speakers in the right positions. If you really want surround, the best way is to get actual surround speakers! But if you don’t want them cluttering up your lounge all the time, Yamaha’s MusicCast Surround allows you to repurpose wireless speakers elsewhere in your home quickly and easily for a special movie night. Case proven. Jez Ford